My perfect terminology database must be shareable, portable and accessible both on and off line (like Interpreters’ Help/Boothmate for Mac and also Google Sheets) but at the same time trustworthy to the point that companies feel comfortable having their terminology stored there (like Interpreters’ Help), sortable and filterable (like MS Access, MS Excel, Lookup, InterpretBank, Termbase and others), customisable with pre-defined views and default values (like in MS Access) and, very importantly, searchable in a way that requires almost no attention – meaning a mouse-free, incremental search function that does not care whether I type “rinon” or “riñón” and tells me that it is kidney in English either way (like Interplex and InterpretBank do), if possible in an easy-to-read hit list.

Airtable, a mix of spreadsheet and database, seems to get very close to it. It is very intuitive to handle and, even more so, it looks just nice and friendly. It has very comfortable sorting and filtering, you can add pictures, links and files, define different views of subsets of your data (like for a specific customer, particular subject area, type of conference or a combination thereof) and set default values so that, while working at a given conference, you don’t need to type the conference name, customer and subject area time and again when entering new terms. And the detailed view of each data set popping up at one click or tap is just lovely. You can import or drag and drop your tables in no time. And Airtable has loads of useful keyboard shortcuts, by the way.

Team glossaries (or anything else) can be worked on by several people and accessed via an iPad, iPhone and Android (beta) app or the browser-based interface, although, when using the browser interface, there is no way to edit your data offline and update the online version later. This works on the mobile apps only. Data being transferred back and forth as well as stored data are encrypted.

The one thing I miss most on Airtable is an intuitive, accent-ignoring search function as described above, which displays hit lists instead of jumping from one search hit to the next. But apart from that, Airtable is just great for data management, not only in terms of „terms“.

It is free of charge as long as your tables don’t have more than 1500 lines, costs 12 $ per month for up to 5000 lines per database and 24 $ for up to 50 000 lines per database.

If you need an overview of available terminology management tools for conference interpreters, click here.

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About the author:
Anja Rütten is a freelance conference interpreter for German (A), Spanish (B), English (C) and French (C) based in Düsseldorf, Germany. She has specialised in knowledge management since the mid-1990s.